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understand that the food was "fine." The Italian officer was much impressed with the gunner's stalwart proportions, and pronounced him to be "simpatico." One did not in reality require a private servant, seeing that handy soldier orderlies had been told off to each of us. But our general had thought fit to saddle himself with a courier, as if a trip to North Italy was a very serious undertaking undertaking indeed. The courier proved nothing but an encumbrance, and stood in need of as much looking after as a bassinette - full of babies; the gunner proved most useful in supervising this troublesome person, intervening when he was going to lose the tickets, or to get into the wrong train, or to do any of those foolish things which instinct seemed ever to be prompting him to do.

Although there is, of course, no prospect of honours and rewards for the soldier on the active list who takes part in a campaign in the capacity of unaccredited spectator, an experience of this kind is likely to be highly instructive, and is sure to be extremely interesting. From the point of view of professional study, it is of great advantage to be able to go where one likes, to be present at the critical point during an action, and to move from one portion of the field to another at will, so as to obtain a good general idea of the tactical situation and to note the progress of the fight. It is convenient, moreover, to be in the position of

selecting one's own time for withdrawing oneself, supposing that the fire becomes unpleasantly warm. I was present with the Greek army during the later phases of their disastrous conflict with the Turks, a campaign where it was judicious to be amongst the leading detachments when it came to a retreat.

At Athens I had been furnished by H.M. Representative with a letter of introduction. to the War Minister, but had found it impossible to get into touch with that official. The passages and corridors of the War Office were hopelessly congested with reservists engaged in exchanging their mufti nether - garments for uniform ones-it seemed an odd place for carrying such an operation out,-and eventually I repaired to the Piræus, without the permit to proceed in a transport up the coast which I had hoped to obtain. But my dragoman proved more than equal to the occasion when we arrived on the jetty. Ask leave? What for? Leave would only be refused. And he took the three ponies on board the steamer which was awaiting the arrival of the troops, placed them in a well - sheltered corner of the main deck, and then deposited my personal effects in the one respectable cabin that was to be found in the vessel. The troops arrived shortly afterwards and came pouring on board. After we had cast off and were getting under weigh, their commanding officer approached me somewhat diffi

dently and asked as a favour that he might be permitted to share monsieur's cabin, a request to which a gracious

assent was accorded.

On the way up to the front a bundle of rugs somehow went astray. Their loss would have been inconvenient enough, as it was cold at night in the hills, but for the Crown Prince, who was Commander-in-Chief, hearing of it, and most kindly sending me over a pair of blankets, with a message to say that the officers on the line of communications had been directed to look out for the bundle, which would probably come to hand in a day or two-as indeed it did. The blankets sent over were white ones, of the finest quality, not at all of the type one usually meets with on active service, and they had a "K" (Konstantinos) and a

crown em

broidered in each corner. Shortly after their arrival an American correspondent happened to come in to pass the time of day, and I showed him the blankets with the air of one accustomed to meet with these little civilities at the hands of royalty. The American correspondent became greatly excited. "Major," said he, "I'll give you fifty dollars for those blankets -right now. And see here; I'll throw in my big coat, so you won't be feeling cold. Come. That's what I call a square deal." He would not listen to protestations to the effect that the goods did not belong to me. He was prepared to go to seventy-five.

And if I would just sit down and write out, say, four hundred words about my career and my services, and anything else of a personal nature suitable for publication, he would cable it off now to the Well, he recommended me to stop over this side if that was my idea of doing business; and when he took himself off the dragoman received stringent instructions to guard my belongings with a jealous eye. That American correspondent had a predatory look, and he might attempt a foray with a view of carrying the blankets off.

During a pause in the operations, and at a time when there seemed some likelihood of a definitive suspension of hostilities in consequence of the interference of the Great Powers, I drove back over the mountains to Lamia with the correspondent of one of our illustrated journals, for a change, and we paid a visit to Thermopyla. The topographical features of the locality must have undergone a transformation since the days of Leonidas, for under the tactical conditions that obtained in the brave days of old, three hundred men tainly could not have held a defile so broad as it is in the present day, against an army. But whatever alterations Nature may have carried out during the past two thousand years, the hot spring from which the famous pass derives its name flows on for ever as a monument to the men of

Sparta. It gushes out from the mountain-side in volume

like a trout stream, and at so high a temperature that you can hardly hold your hand in it at the actual orifice. The water is so impregnated with sulphur as to make you sneeze, and a tribute to its medicinal qualities is paid in the form of rude bathing-sheds, which, however, were deserted at the time of our visit on account of the war. Nothing would serve my companion but to bathe, and the consequence was that when we got back to Lamia he was extremely unwell, and was obliged to send for a doctor.

We were quartered in the attics of the local hotel, a vast apartment under the rafters which was broken up into cubicles like a dormitory at school. Here we lived in close communion with all sorts and conditions of men, women, and children. There were refugees from Thessaly, accompanied by belongings which under no conceivable circumstances could have been of any use to any body. There were officers. There were soldiers. There was a prehistoric-looking German who had been engaged in burrowing for antiquities under the shadow of Mount Olympus, and whose archæological activities had been interrupted by the approach of the Osmanli hordes. The doctor arrived in due course, and I was invited into my companion's cubicle to act as interpreter, for he was happier in the handling of a pencil than in conversing in foreign tongues. The doctor was one of those long, thin, dried-up

sort of old men in spectacles who figure as professors in a play, and his examination took the usual form of question and answer and of feeling the pulse and inspecting the tongue. As the conversation was carried out in a mixture of French and German and Italian and English, interlarded with occasional Greek, it would have been bewildering even if it had not been concerned with somewhat technical subjects. However, the doctor eventually wrote out a prescription in the vernacular, pocketed one of the filthy bank-notes which serve as currency in the country, and took his departure.

All this time singular sounds had been issuing from the adjoining cubicle, as of somebody attempting to stifle his mirth and simultaneously pulling on clothes; and scarcely had the doctor disappeared when there came a knock at the door, and there bounded in upon us like an indiarubber ball a fat little man, partially dressed in uniform and in a condition of uproarious hilarity, who let loose upon us a torrent of French, and who introduced himself as a colonel in the Greek Army Medical Service. He had overheard the conversation with the civilian doctor, and the diagnosis: the man was an imbecile, an impostor, an ignoramus; his questions had been absurd, his conclusions preposterous. By this time the colonel had my companion by the wrist with his tongue out, and almost before we had recovered from the shock he had thrust another

prescription, also of course in Greek, into my hand, and had bounced out of the cubicle and back into his own, where we could hear him still chuckling to himself as he apparently betook himself to bed again, although it was about five o'clock in the afternoon. Physicians may, or may not, be a capable and devoted body of men in the Kingdom of the Hellenes, but professional etiquette would not appear to be their strong point. Whether my friend made a selection between the two prescriptions, or whether he partook of both, or of neither, I do not recollect; but, be that as it may, he was completely restored to health by 3 A.M. on the following morning.

For that evening a pair of stormy petrels in the shape of

Mr Villiers and Reuter's Correspondent arrived suddenly from Athens, veteran campaigners both of them, of the type which knows instinctively when stirring events are about to take place. From what they let fall on discovering that I was a soldier and not a newspaper man, it became evident that we ought to be hurrying back to the front again. We started off from Lamia at dawn, and as we topped the rise just short of Domokos a little before noon, something hurtled through the air overhead and buried itself with a crash in the hill-side above us. It was the shell fired from a Turkish howitzer which ushered in the last battle to be fought with smoke powder by disciplined armies on the continent of Europe.

JAMES DOUGLAS, M.D.

SURGEON VENTURER.

BY GENERAL THE RIGHT HON. SIR HENRY BRACKENBURY, G.C.B.

ONCE in a way, by a stroke of good luck, one comes across a book, unattractive in external appearance, and with a title that conveys little-a book of which one has never heard, but which, on perusal, is found to be a mine of adventure and of illustrations of bygone customs. Such a book is the Journals and Reminiscences of James Douglas, M.D.,' edited by and privately printed at New York in 1910 for his son, through whose kind permission we are enabled to present this sketch this sketch to the readers of 'Maga.'

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been compounded, and therefore those

who knew him well wondered that he remained obscure. Perhaps he knew himself better than others knew him, and may have suspected that the strong properties of his nature were mingled with others so inconsistent eccentric and full of contradictions to bear the scrutiny of the public eye."

that the resultant was a character too

This fine old Scotsman was born at Brechin, in Angus, in the year 1800, his father being a Wesleyan minister. We have a delightful picture of the hard-working, earnest, simpleminded minister, whose "life was spent in one long process of introspection and self-dissection," whose chief pursuits, apart from his work, were trout-fishing and collecting religious anecdotes, with which he filled several volumes that passed through several editions.

From Brechin the minister was moved in turn to Carlisle and to Dumfries, at which places, as a Methodist minister could not well be seen walking through the streets with a rod and a basket, his son James had always to join him with those necessaries at the river's side.

It is with this son that we are concerned. Taken by his father from the Academy at Dumfries, where he was advanced in Virgil, he was sent at the age of twelve to a Wesleyan College in Yorkshire, when, finding he was losing

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